{"id":46192,"date":"2018-12-04T12:10:16","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T20:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=46192"},"modified":"2018-12-04T12:10:16","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T20:10:16","slug":"perfectionism-is-a-spectrum-disorder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/perfectionism-is-a-spectrum-disorder\/","title":{"rendered":"Perfectionism is a spectrum disorder"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last year I had a health crisis, brought on by many years of just working too many hours.<\/p>\n

After about 15 years of regularly doing 50 or 60 hour weeks something inside me just\u2026 snapped. It started with unexpected bouts of tears at work, then rapidly progressed to anxiety attacks, exhaustion and mood swings. The next step would probably have been depression, but luckily I took some action before that happened.<\/p>\n

After more than a decade of working with PhD students experiencing mental health issues, I should have recognised some of the symptoms of\u00a0burn out<\/a>\u00a0sooner. I have to say, it was a disconcerting experience. The temptation to stay in bed and avoid everything and everyone was strong. It\u2019s taken a year, and quite a few different strategies, to find my way back to health and balance. A hard year, but in retrospect, I\u2019m glad to learn my limits \u2013 and be forced to examine the effects my overwork on others.<\/p>\n

Part of the solution was therapy, which has helped me see my tendency towards\u00a0\u2018rumination\u2019:<\/a>\u00a0obsessive and repetitive thought patterns that can make it hard to concentrate and be present in the moment. My mind is always asking tricky \u201c\u2026 but what if?\u201d questions \u2013 you know, the extremely plausible sounding ones that only increase anxiety. I\u2019ve often felt I\u2019m in a pitched battle with my own mind.<\/p>\n

I think I now understand one reason why mental health is such an issue for PhD candidates (and academics for that matter).\u00a0We have minds that are conditioned by years and years of arguing.<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m extremely skilled at arguing with myself and building elaborate theories about what will go wrong in the future (based, it must be said, on scant evidence in the present). Now my strategy to counteract these thoughts is to pretend I am at a tiresome academic seminar, full of tedious old farts from around the faculty who have turned up just to give me a hard time\u2026 I\u2019m getting better at telling them to shut up.<\/p>\n

One of the things my therapist has been encouraging me to explore is a certain tendency to perfectionism. I have never identified as a perfectionist before, mostly because I have associated perfectionism with being \u2018stuck\u2019. I\u2019ve met plenty of students who are so afraid of failing they can\u2019t start \u2013 or they start over and over again, deleting all their previous work. By contrast, I am good at getting shit done. I can get a project\u00a0out the door.<\/a><\/p>\n

What I didn\u2019t consider is that my standards are ridiculously high \u2013 not just in my work, but in my life. I take on more projects than I should \u2013 and they tend to be difficult. I will put in ridiculously long hours to keep up with my ambition to do these difficult projects. I\u2019m always worried my work isn\u2019t good enough. These feelings aren\u2019t really the so-called \u2018imposter syndrome\u2019 (which is not actually a diagnosable condition<\/a>), rather I think the constant worry is just a natural reaction to dealing with the hypercritical world of academia itself.<\/p>\n

After my therapist encouraged me to research the problem, I discovered all this literature on \u2018functional\u2019 or \u2018adaptive\u2019 perfectionism. The symptoms might sound familiar:<\/p>\n